Itch.io won’t take a cut of game sales on May 14th

This Friday, May 14th, indie game storefront Itch.io will hold its first-ever Creator Day. The marketplace will forgo its usual cut of sales, with 100 percent of any transactions that day — after taxes and payment processing fees — going directly to creators. Effectively that makes Creator Day a Bandcamp Friday for video games. Launched last year, the initiative has seen fans pay out more than $52 million directly to artists and labels. “We hope to make this a regular event to give developers an excuse to share and promote their works,” Itch.io says of Creator Day.

As Polygon points out, Itch.io is already an outlier in the industry. Since 2015, the company has employed an open revenue share model that allows sellers to decide how much of their revenue they share with the company. By default, Itch.io takes a 10 percent cut of sales, but developers can set that figure anywhere between zero and 100 percent. When Friday rolls around, sellers won’t need to change anything in their account settings to participate in Creator Day. The industry standard is 30 percent — though some companies like Epic and Microsoft take a less substantial cut on PC. Revenue sharing models — and what’s a reasonable amount for platform holders to take from developers — has been one of the main issues at play in Epic’s ongoing legal battle with Apple.